Indications are that the average database size and associated software support systems are growing at rates that are greater than the increase in processor performance (i.e., more than doubling roughly every 18 months). This is due to a number of factors including without limitation the desire to store more detailed information, to store information over longer periods of time, to merge databases from disparate organizations, and to deal with the large new databases which have arisen from emerging and important applications. For example, two emerging applications having large and rapidly growing databases are those connected with the genetics revolution and those associated with cataloging and accessing information on the Internet. In the case of the Internet, current industry estimates are that in excess of 1.5 million pages are added to the Internet each day. At the physical level this has been made possible by the remarkable growth in disk storage performance where magnetic storage density has been doubling every year or so for the past five years.
Search and retrieval functions are more easily performed on information when it is indexed. For example, with respect to financial information, it can be indexed by company name, stock symbol and price. Oftentimes, however, the information being searched is of a type that is either hard to categorize or index or which falls into multiple categories. As a result, the accuracy of a search for information is only as good as the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the index created therefor. In the case of the Internet, however, the information is not indexed. The bottleneck for indexing is the time taken to develop the reverse index needed to access web pages in reasonable time. For example, while there are search engines available, designing a search which will yield a manageable result is becoming increasingly difficult due to the large number of “hits” generated by less than a very detailed set of search instructions. For this reason, several “intelligent” search engines have been offered on the web, such as Google, which are intended to whittle down the search result using logic to eliminate presumed undesired “hits”.
With the next-generation Internet, ever-faster networks, and expansion of the Internet content, this bottleneck is becoming a critical concern. Further, it is becomingly exceedingly difficult to index information on a timely basis. In the case of the Internet, current industry estimates are that in excess of 1.5 million pages are added to the Internet each day. As a result, maintaining and updating a reverse index has become an enormous and continuous task and the bottleneck it causes is becoming a major impediment to the speed and accuracy of existing search and retrieval systems. Given the ever increasing amounts of information available, however, the ability to accurately and quickly search and retrieve desired information has become critical.